This is probably the most famous clip from the show: Maude thinking about getting an abortion.

Added personal note: I saw Bea Arthur on Broadway in the 1960s in "Mame." I remember her sitting on a big crescent moon singing "The Man in the Moon Is a Miss." Here she is reminiscing about that scene and performing the song. [CORRECTION: Bea was singing the song, and Angela Lansbury was sitting on the moon. Sorry. It was 40 years ago. I really did see it though.]

They did not vote to stop authorizing CIA funding. And for those who now reveal filed "memorandums for the record" suggesting concern, real concern should have been expressed immediately... and not quietly filed away in case the day came when the political winds shifted. And shifted they have.

... The CIA has been pulled into the center ring before. The result this time will be the same: a hollowed-out service of diminished capabilities. After Sept. 11, the general outcry was, "Why don't we have better overseas capabilities?" I fear that in the years to come this refrain will be heard again: once a threat -- or God forbid, another successful attack -- captures our attention and sends the pendulum swinging back. There is only one person who can shut down this dangerous show: President Obama.

On a very basic level, judging people by appearance means putting them quickly into impersonal categories, much like deciding whether an animal is a dog or a cat. “Stereotypes are seen as a necessary mechanism for making sense of information,” said David Amodio, an assistant professor of psychology at New York University....

Eons ago, this capability was of life-and-death importance, and humans developed the ability to gauge other people within seconds....

One reason our brains persist in using stereotypes, experts say, is that often they give us broadly accurate information, even if all the details don’t line up. Ms. Boyle’s looks, for example, accurately telegraphed much about her biography, including her socioeconomic level and lack of worldly experience.

Her behavior on stage reinforced an outsider image. David Berreby, author of “Us and Them,” about why people categorize one another, said the TV audience may have also judged her harshly because, in banter with the judges before singing, she appeared to be trying, awkwardly, to fit in....

[John F. Dovidio, a psychology professor at Yale] said that encountering discrepancies to stereotypes probably “creates a sort of autonomic arousal” in our peripheral nervous system, triggering spikes of cortisol and other indicators of stress. “That autonomic arousal is going to motivate us to do something in that situation,” he said, especially if the situation is dangerous.

But we're not out on the savannah in evolutionary times. We're sitting at home on our comfy sofas, experiencing the thrill that was once danger.

Are there really still people like that? Are you one of them? Were you ever? Have you ever approached a stranger and initiated a conversation because you noticed the book he (or she) was reading?

What book titles would most rouse you to talk to a stranger? And if people don't go up and talk to strangers because of the book they are reading in public, with the cover up where you can see it, then what do we have? Lonely readers forever nursing the hope that someone will appreciate their intelligence, sensitivity, and taste! What are the lonely readers reading that reinforces such unlikely patterns of hope?

Ironically, if you are out in public with a Kindle, lots of people will come over and talk to you about it —

Hey, is that a Kindle 2? What do you read on that thing? Are you some kind of voracious reader or something?

President Obama rebuffed calls for a commission to investigate alleged abuses under the Bush administration in fighting terrorism, telling congressional leaders at a White House meeting yesterday that he wants to look forward instead of litigating the past.

Seated in Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's West Wing office with about a dozen of his political, legal and security appointees, Obama requested a mini-debate in which one official was chosen to argue for releasing the memos and another was assigned to argue against doing so. When it ended, Obama dictated on the spot a draft of his announcement that the documents would be released, while most of the officials watched, according to an official who was present. The disclosure happened the next day.

Watched calmly? Watched with dismay? Surely the source characterized the mood. I'd like to know.

Obama's aides have told political allies that the last-minute conversation, which ended around 9:30 p.m., demonstrated the president's commitment to airing both sides of a debate that was particularly contentious. But it also reflected widespread angst inside the White House that a public airing and repudiation of the harsh interrogation techniques that the last administration sought to keep secret would spark a national security debate with conservatives that could undermine Obama's broader agenda....

This suggests that the argument for withholding the memos was political, but wasn't the argument for releasing them also political?

Several Obama aides said the president's decision was in line with his frequent criticism during the campaign of President George W. Bush's policies on interrogations at secret prisons. On his second day in office, Obama banned the prisons and the tactics in an executive order.

The aides also said they hope the memos' release will focus public attention on the coldness and sterility of the legal justifications for abusive techniques, with Obama telling reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday that the documents demonstrate that the nation lost its "moral bearings" in the Bush years.

Legal analysis tends to look cool and analytical. Yes, you can say that's cold and sterile. Would the people be less roused by memos that were contaminated with nonlegal considerations and overflowing with passion. It's a lawyer's argument — and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and White House counsel Gregory B. Craig were in favor of releasing the memos — to say that some legal analysis they don't like is cold and sterile. Don't ordinary people expect legal analysis to look legal?

[T]he International Association of Professional Black Firefighters tells us, "Cognitive examinations have an adverse effect upon blacks and other minorities." Du Bois crowed, "Fifty years ago the ability of Negro students in any appreciable numbers to master a modern college course would have been difficult to prove," and proudly documents 2,500 black college graduates. Imagine Du Bois listening to a rep from the black firefighters' association now sneering that the promotion test merely measures "the ability to read and retain"--i.e. engage in higher-level thinking processes! O tempora, o mores.

This will not do: People like Du Bois did not dedicate their lives to paving the way for black people to be exempt from tests. Sure, the tests may not correlate perfectly with firefighters' duties. But which falls more into the spirit of black uplift that you could explain to a foreigner in less than three minutes: teaching black candidates how to show what they are made of despite obstacles, or banning a test of mental agility as inappropriate to impose on black candidates?

The case, brought by white firefighters in New Haven who were denied promotions after an examination yielded no black firefighters eligible for advancement, featured claims of race discrimination on both sides. It was, Justice David H. Souter said, a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation.”

Had the city allowed the promotional exam to stand, Justice Souter said, it would have faced a lawsuit from black firefighters. When it threw out the test, promoting no one, it was sued by 18 white firefighters, one of them Hispanic, who claimed race discrimination.

The city said that throwing out a flawed test was a racially neutral act. Because no one was promoted, the city said, no one was singled out on the basis of race. But Justice Antonin Scalia was having none of that.

“It’s neutral because you throw it out for the losers as well as for the winners?” he asked. “That’s neutrality?”...

The city “looked at the results, and it classified the successful and unsuccessful applicants by race,” Justice Kennedy said to Edwin S. Kneedler, who represented the federal government. “And then you want us to say this isn’t race? I have trouble with this argument.”...

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. [asked] the lawyer for New Haven, Christopher J. Meade. “Why is this not intentional discrimination?” Chief Justice Roberts asked. “There are particular individuals here,” he continued, “and they say they didn’t get their jobs because of intentional racial action by the city.”

Mr. Meade said the city should be afforded protection because it was trying to comply with a federal law.

Read the whole thing. This is genuinely a complicated problem, as the Breyer hypotheticals at the end of the article demonstrate.

Potential, kids. It's all about potential. I hope you've chewed enough gum to notice that "potential," in that construction, refers to how it's only just a possibility that gum might make you a bigger, better, stronger, sharper person.

It's like a Western movie up here. Can you really just swagger around the sidewalks of Madison and Milwaukee with a gun in a holster? In your hand?

Milwaukee Police Chief Ed Flynn said he'll continue to tell officers they can't assume people are carrying guns legally in a city that has seen nearly 200 homicides in the past two years.

"My message to my troops is if you see anybody carrying a gun on the streets of Milwaukee, we'll put them on the ground, take the gun away and then decide whether you have a right to carry it," Flynn said. "Maybe I'll end up with a protest of cowboys. In the meantime, I've got serious offenders with access to handguns. It's irresponsible to send a message to them that if they just carry it openly no one can bother them."

So if you see Police Chief Ed Flynn, put him on the ground, take his wallet away, and then decide whether he’s accepted any bribes that day. If, after doing that, you think the money’s his, give his wallet back. Who cares what the law says? It’s the Milwaukee Way!

[Northwest Austin Utility District v. Holder] challenges Congress's reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act in 2006... But... Congress didn't engage in a serious empirical comparison of voting patterns in the areas of the country that are and aren't covered by the Voting Rights Act. The civil rights establishment was intent on preserving the status quo, which has led to the election of some African Americans in the South at the expense of the Democratic party as a whole; and ... neither Republicans nor Democrats were willing to acknowledge the evidence suggesting that discriminatory barriers to ballot access today, unlike the '60s, seem to be very rare....

[Ricci v. DeStefano is] the most controversial affirmative action case of the term, involving the promotion of firefighters in New Haven. In 2003, the city administered a promotion test. The test was validated by independent experts, as federal law requires, to ensure that it focused on job-related skills rather than purely cognitive ones. But, after the test was administered, none of the top-scoring candidates for 15 positions turned out to be African American. (Fourteen were white, and one was Hispanic.) ... [T]he city refused to certify the exam and promoted no one. The city was then sued by 19 white firefighters (and one Hispanic) led by Frank Ricci, a sympathetic 34-year-old white man. Ricci, who is dyslexic, spent more than $1,000 buying the study guides recommended by the city and paying an acquaintance to record them as audiotapes, which he listened to as he drove to and from work.

The Ricci case is a nightmare for moderate liberal supporters of affirmative action, because it presents the least sympathetic facts imaginable. The Supreme Court has said repeatedly that affirmative action is most troubling when its burdens are concentrated on a few innocent white people rather than being widely dispersed among a large group of white and black applicants....

If the Supreme Court strikes down part of the Voting Rights Act and the New Haven affirmative action program, [it] would force Obama to articulate a moderate, middle-of-the-road position on race that is rooted in empirical evidence rather than ideology....

With all the other problems facing the country--from the economy to the war on terrorism--Obama has no incentive to take on liberal racialists who believe we've made little progress on race since the 1960s or conservative color-blind partisans who insist that anti-discrimination laws are no longer necessary. But everything in Obama's background suggests that he has the inclination and ability to help the country transcend the extremes that have defined our racial politics for too long.

Origins of the state names, nicely charted here. The post title refers to Delaware and Wisconsin, my original and current home states.

There are some great state names and some not-so-great ones. I plan to list the state names from best to worst. I'm not quite ready. I seek your input. But I have developed some principles:

1. I strongly approve of the use of words from Indian languages. I suspect all the best names will fit this category: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas...

2. The names of Spanish derivation are all good: California, Colorado, Florida, Montana, and Nevada. Except for California, it's pretty easy to see what they refer to. Vermont works the same way with French. (It means green mountain.) This is an okay approach to naming.

3. I celebrate the 4-letter names: Iowa, Utah, and Ohio. All 3 are also from the Indian language and therefore belong at or near the top of the list. There are also 2 great 5-letter names: Idaho and Texas. And then there's Maine.

4. Anything with "New" that looks back to the old country is pathetic.

5. Points off for including a compass point. "Dakota" is a great name, but one of the Dakotas should have consulted the Sioux dictionary for another suitable — siouxtable — word. Don't the both of you be grabbing at the same word.

6. Naming the state after an American President, done exactly once, was not a very good idea, because it's unAmerican to adulate Presidents and because we already had the national capital named after that President, so it created unnecessary confusion and required us to say "D.C." all the time, which isn't amusing at all.

7. I deplore references to English or French royalty, even when these are processed away from the original name — like Virginia and Carolina — and not embarrassingly plain — like Louisiana, Maryland, and Georgia.

8. References to other English celebrities is stupid but that stupidity may be canceled out by the contribution the character actually made in America or by the coolness of the resulting word. There are only 2 names in this category, and I think I've just given both of them a pass.

What is driving Drudge to seclusion? Those who know him say that part of the reason he has disappeared from public view is that he is so bothered by the media's prurient interest in his personal life...

Perhaps Limbaugh... was trying to protect a fellow conservative from attack by the left. Or maybe he simply grasped something that now appears very obvious: Matt Drudge owes his power in part to the air of mystery that surrounds him.

Elsewhere in the NYT, there's a whole big story about a woman who tweets other people's recipes. It's a challenge translating the directions into 140 characters. It's also a challenge translating them out of 140 characters if you actually want to use them.

***

Remember when you borrowed the notes of a classmate who had a penchant for compression? Or were you the one who always went to class and then did you deliberately compress, compress like mad — with lots of idiosyncratic abbreviations — so you could say I don't think these notes are comprehensible to anyone but me? Did they insist on borrowing your notes anyway? (Remember how nerve-wracking that was back in the days when it meant handing over your precious spiral notebook?)

***

Questions:

1. Tightly compressed writing. Good or bad?

2. New York Times constantly writing about Twitter. Good or bad? If bad: bad because they need to keep being obsessed with blogging?

3. Class notes. Were you the one who wanted to borrow or the one pressed to share? Did you?

4. Blogging: Compress more or go ahead and expand? (No one stopping you.)

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said the school officials should be shielded from being sued since the law governing school searches had not been clear...

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy... objected when Adam Wolf, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer for Redding, argued that the strip search was unreasonable because there was no evidence she was hiding anything in her underwear.

"Is the nature of drug irrelevant?" he asked. "What if it was meth to be consumed at noon?"...

It is "a logical thing" for adolescents to hide things, [Justice Breyer] said. A student might stick something "in their underwear," he added, provoking laughter when he said that this had happened to him at school. "It's not beyond human experience."...

"Better embarrassment [of one student] than the risk of violent sickness and death," Souter said.

Those are the kind of transformations in which the recipients spend a little time figuring out precisely why they've been squeamish about trying to achieve their personal best. Just before her triumphant performance on "Britain's Got Talent," Boyle said she wanted to be a professional singer, but no one had ever given her the chance. It was a reasonable comment, but it also had the ring of passivity to it. What held Boyle back for so long?...

The tale of Susan Boyle will not be complete until the shy spinster blossoms. Those who have been entranced by her story so far should let Boyle's fairy godmother finish her work.

Yeah. The idea of keeping her in her original state is sentimental and selfish. Is she supposed to bolster your self esteem? One of her attributes is that she's never been kissed. (She's 47.) Should she retain her virginity along with her bushy eyebrows so that TV viewers can feel warm and squishy?

***

Here's an article about Stacy London of "What Not to Wear." She's Phi Beta Kappa from Vassar with degrees in 20th-century philosophy and German literature, and she's been skinny (90 pounds) and fat (180) — so presumably she's knows what she's talking about when she tells less-than-perfect women to cast aside their slovenly comfy clothes and show off their curves.

The point of the show, she says, is to help people "find perfection in their imperfection." That means helping them really see the image they're projecting to the world -- which can be painful. "You have to see it clearly," London argues, "so you know what you're working with, what to emphasize, what to camouflage." Helping makeover subjects see themselves that clearly sometimes requires tough talk. "People think we're being mean," she says. "But we're helping take down barriers."

"Obama was correct not to walk out on the speech. But... [w]hen Obama spoke later, he should have prefaced his promising call for an 'equal partnership' with other countries in the hemisphere with some strong pushback against those who would rather relive the insults of the past than move forward."

In nullifying the law, the Circuit Court refused to create a new exception to the First Amendment to apply to portrayals of animal cruelty. It noted that the Supreme Court “last declared an entire category of speech unprotected” by the Amendment in 1982 (in New York v. Ferber, involving child pornography). The Circuit Court rejected a government argument that the depiction of animal cruelty was analogous to the depiction of child pornography.

[T]he Justice Department argued that the 1999 law is narrow in scope, applying only to a “particularly harmful class of speech,” only when that is done for commercial gain, and only when the particular depiction has “no serious societal value.”

A footnote to another 2005 Justice Department memo released Thursday said waterboarding was used both more frequently and with a greater volume of water than the C.I.A. rules permitted.

The new information on the number of waterboarding episodes came out over the weekend when a number of bloggers, including Marcy Wheeler of the blog emptywheel, discovered it in the May 30, 2005, [Justice Department] memo.

It seems to me that the mainstream press should have found everything significant in the memos within a few hours. Why is some blogger the one to discover something days later?

Koh argues that American law should reflect "transnational" legal values—and that in an interconnected world it inevitably does to some extent already. In his writings, Koh has campaigned to expand some rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution—and perhaps shrink some others, including the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech—to better conform to the laws of other nations. He has, for instance, pushed for a more expansive view of what constitutes "cruel and unusual punishment" under the Eighth Amendment. Koh's views are in tune with—if bolder than—those of a majority of the Supreme Court on some issues....

Were his writings to become policy, judges might have the power to use debatable interpretations of treaties and "customary international law" to override a wide array of federal and state laws affecting matters as disparate as the redistribution of wealth and prostitution. He has campaigned to write into U.S. law the United Nations "Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women," signed by President Carter in 1980 but never ratified by Congress. A U.N. committee supervising the treaty's implementation has called for the "decriminalizing of prostitution" in China, the legalization of abortion in Colombia, and the abolition of Mother's Day in Belarus (for "encouraging woman's traditional roles"). In 2002 Senate testimony, Koh stressed that these reports are not binding law, and he dismissed as "preposterous" the notion that the treaty would "somehow require the United States to abolish Mother's Day." Still, the reports are very much part of the "transnational" legal process that Koh celebrates.

"President Obama endured a 50-minute diatribe from socialist Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega that lashed out at a century of what he called terroristic U.S. aggression in Central America and included a rambling denunciation of the U.S.-imposed isolation of Cuba's Communist government. Obama sat mostly unmoved during the speech but at times jotted notes" [writes Major Garrett at FOXNews.com.]

Notes, eh?

America responsible for evils of world.

Ortega angry.

I'm bored.

Communism... good for Cuba? Wd b much more successful if not for U.S. evil.

Racism

expansionist policy of U.S.

Look serious. Pretend these are real notes. Listen thoughtfully.

Sandinistas... Contras... check info

Look thoughtful

He can't blame me. I was 3.

When is this idiot going to shut up?

Boooorrrrringggg

ADDED: Actually, Obama said "I'm grateful that President Ortega did not blame me for things that happened when I was three months old." That rhetoric sounded familiar. Remember this?

IN THE COMMENTS: Maguro said:

Not sure why he needed to take notes since he listened to the same sermon at Trinity Church for 20 years. You'd think he'd have it memorized by now.